CSotD: Misfire Power
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After yesterday's rant about cartoonists who don't leap into action, Clay Bennett nails one that reminds me that some things are worth waiting for.
This doesn't erase my impatience with a system in which the response is "But I don't do a national cartoon until Wednesday." I continue to believe that political cartoonists need to be able to push out ideas when they are needed, not when they are scheduled.
But that is more the system than the cartoonists. There are plenty of papers in which there is a lot of talk about "no deadlines" and pressure to get things up right away, and yet a hierarchy of access in which you must bow to the High Priest of Posting Stuff in order to change the way things are done.
Ain't nobody gonna post a cartoon Monday if the schedule says the cartoon posts Wednesday.
I always had good relations with the backshop, and several times I was told, "Okay, but if you tell anyone I did this, I'll kill you." But that kind of one-to-one conversation and dispensing of favors is less possible every day, and certainly easier at a paper of 25,000 circulation than at one with 250,000.
Which is a separate conversation, because that little paper is almost always not only more personally connected internally but to its readership as well.
In any case, Bennett has crafted a response to the response rather than a generic hipshot, and it's a worthy riposte to my demand for quicker commentary.
KInd of reminds me of the sign you used to see in some diners, "Fast food is not good. Good food is not fast."
But, even with time to reflect, cartoonists are cranking out a lot of generic so-what. In fact, several have posted things on Facebook that they said at the last mass shooting, which, even if it were well-said, makes the point that not much distinguishes this shooting from those others.
Bennett notes something — someone — that does.
And the "Oh Shut Up" award is shared among a couple of cartoonists unspecified in deference to the Prime Directive who trotted out the canard that the Founding Fathers didn't anticipate modern, semiautomatic weapons when they wrote the Second Amendment.
Now, they didn't intend that individuals would be keeping cannons in their homes, and an argument could be made in that direction.
But the idea that they only approved guns because they fired so slowly is a seriously foolish misreading of the intent of the amendment as well as the fact that the Bill of Rights is based on principles, not specifics.
First of all, there's a plausible argument that a militia made up of hunters with rifles was better equipped than a unit of British infantry with muskets.
More critical is that I've never seen this logic applied to the First Amendment. If the Founding Fathers only approved gun ownership because muzzle loaders are so slow, how would they feel about the comparison between handset type and broadcast media, much less the Internet? They certainly didn't anticipate a "press" that didn't include presses, did they?
Perhaps once President Trump takes office, we'll start seeing cartoons in which that argument is made, mostly as an excuse to shut down "phony and dishonest" media.
Until then, let's talk about why the Founders felt militias were a good idea, and how quickly they abandoned the notion along with their fear that soldiers would be quartered in private homes.
Or we might focus on whether they ever intended for civilians to own cannons.
Juxtaposition of the Serendipitous
Whatever can be said about editorial cartoonists waiting too long to comment or leaping in before the facts are on the table, sometimes a cartoonist simply blunders into an unintentionally relevant commentary.
And sometimes two of them do.
Wiley Miller kicked off an arc yesterday that, though prepared some weeks ago, echoes the impatience with a Congress that offers prayers and sympathy and moments of silence and does nothing to actually address the issue. It's always possible to bring a little extra wit to a common complaint, but it's rarely possible to have it accidentally hit at such a propitious moment.
But that bit of odd timing pales next to the perfect-though-coincidental fit between today's Pearls and the bizarre arguments currently being advanced in which ammosexuals argue that, in fact, the gun used by the assailant is only a semi-automatic, not an automatic, and not really an assault rifle.
Which I'm sure is very comforting if you happen to be one of the 49 people lucky enough to have been killed not by an actual military-grade assault rifle but merely by a slightly scaled-down civilian version.
On that topic: A year or so ago, an old schoolmate of mine re-posted a "Top Ten Deer Rifles" piece from a hunting magazine that I wish I could find, because eight of the 10 were fairly standard bolt or lever action long rifles. A ninth, as I recall, was a semi-automatic with a five-bullet clip, but it was still a standard-looking wooden deer rifle, the kind most of my high school friends grew up using.
The standout was what most folks would call an "assault rifle," by which I mean black, plastic, pistol-grip, long clip, which was described — I'm not making this up — as useful if you are hunting deer on a small patch of land and must stop the animal quickly enough that it does not, in its death throes, cross over onto private property where hunting is forbidden.
In other words, a gun for creating deerburgers on the spot.
In the comments under the piece, there were several complaints about some substandard guns being included simply because their manufacturers advertised in the magazine. None of them singled out that ridiculous gun, but the fact remains: Real hunters can detect bullshit.
They need to speak up now in opposition to the nutbags and screwballs.
That's part of "responsible gun ownership."
Now here's your moment of old-school, blue-collar zen
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